Dear Sarah,
Of course different people take different things from a work of art, and works of art, like elephants, can be apprehended at many different levels. But I don’t think we want to undervalue the importance of actually knowing what one is talking about or looking at. People always talk about the groundlings’ great love of Shakespeare, as if to say that great art is not so difficult, but Shakespeare was the groundlings’ contemporary–his words and conceptual framework and topical references weren’t so foreign to their ears. They may have grasped a lot more than we tend to give them credit for: They all knew, for instance, that “wherefore” means “why” and not “where” and could identify the different factions in the history plays that are so hard to keep straight now.
There’s a lot of art that I know I would respond to more deeply if I could imaginatively apprehend it with an awareness of the way its audience was meant to respond. For example, all those 17th- and 18th-century Italian pictures of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, surrounded by angels. To me, they look silly–grandiose, saccharine, overblown, vulgar. The Virgin simpers and rolls her eyes, clouds billow, little winged baby heads fly about. Who needs this! I think. But there they are, in just about every museum in the world that can afford them, multimillion-dollar, certified Great Art. I would argue that the only way to get much out of such paintings is either to share the overblown tastes of the Italian Baroque, to be religious in the way the pictures are, or to see them historically. But in order to see a painting historically, you have to understand what it is doing visually, so there the two approaches come together.
Now, Mr. Armstrong has written in to “The Fray,” and I must say his letter is a model of what a writer’s response to a nonrave review should be–none of the usual bile, spite, outrage, and scorn. I felt an immediate urge to say nice things about his book and to apologize for having made fun of Italian sports cars. He makes a good point, too, that the historical and the aesthetic are not opposed, but you can understand something historically and still not like it much, so he is trying to awaken the reader’s sense of visual enjoyment. It’s hard to argue with that. My problem was that Move Closer did that best when he discussed specific paintings, and there wasn’t enough of that.
I also wish he had queried at least a little bit the related ideas of the museum, greatness, and art. Since you mention your child, I would like to use my child-mentioning space to recommend a book by a friend–Alan Wallach’s Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press). It’s a fascinating discussion of the history of museums and the idea of the museum–what is thought to belong in them, who are they made for, what stories about ourselves do museums tell, why certain kinds of people–(Proust’s young lady, you, me) go there or feel they should. The subject of the art world–or artworld, as it is now so often styled–is very deep: the few thousand people who keep the whole business of art going through museums, galleries, reviews, art history departments, books like this. You can’t talk about it without talking about money–and let’s not forget that Mr. Armstrong is an art dealer–and yet, that is the one thing that is almost never talked about. Move Closer sometimes reminded me of the energetic and very knowledgeable docents one sees sometimes in museums, guiding about a wealthy couple from the provinces. She (the vast majority of docents are female) explains how you can tell the arm in this portrait was painted over and how the sun picks out the rooftops in that rural scene. It’s all quite interesting–I like to stand next to the couple and hear the free chat. But you just know that someone is trying to extract some serious money from those upwardly mobile innocents!
When I left the museum, I stopped to watch a street performer. He was a thin, middle-aged Japanese man, dressed in the black costume of a stagehand in the Noh drama. He was engaged in covering a square of sidewalk with a square of 10,000 pennies, which he laid down carefully and precisely, one by one. A sign read: “After I complete the piece, I will dismantle it. In doing so, I will make ART out of MONEY and allow ART to revert to MONEY.”
The history of art, I thought, in a single sentence.
I’ve really enjoyed our talk–the first of many, I hope.
Cheers,
Katha
